Charles Chasie
Recently, I found that my mind kept straying off to thoughts of people I have known, and to friends and friendships, and how they complete the circle of one’s life. Perhaps, this was partly a result of the fact that many friends have passed away in the last few years. Also maybe, part of why this has happened is that many of my close friends and colleagues are much older than I, some even in terms of decades! But that cannot be the only reason because many of my own peers, in terms of years, have also passed on. Sometimes, you can surmise, even empathize, but you don’t always understand such happenings. But they make you think! They also make you feel gratitude and humility to both God and friends, home and away, often more talented than you are, because while you mourn your friends who enriched your life while they were around, you also realize that they have been “recalled” home by the Father who apparently has more need of their company than yours!
Such thoughts also make you think of what friendship is all about and how little thought one, sometimes, gives to it. One’s best friends are those who know the kind of person you are but who keep seeing the potential in you and what you are meant to become! I feel I have been privileged with so many friends of this category, past and present. Surely, it is not because one is deserving of such friendships. Certainly, it must have more to do with the godliness in such friends and the boundless mercy of God that keeps overlooking the pitiable state of your weaknesses and your frequent disobedience!
Such train of thinking also makes you realize the uncanny ways in which God, sometimes, seems to use other people to befriend you just when you needed them. They may not be “old friends” that you have known for a long time. They may not even be impressive looking people! But at different times, they somehow “intervene” to inspire/enable you just in the right way and take you to the next step whether, at the time, you realize or not and may even help set a trend that may effect changes that are important not only in your personal life but reach out to a much wider field than you can ever imagine possible!
“Forgive your enemies : It makes them go crazy!” is a piece of great advertising that appeals to both the divine spark and the human in Man! But it is true friendship, regardless of time periods, that is truly edifying and completes the circle of life! True friendship is a divine spark generated by the quality of life lived by a person and which ignites the chemistry between two people and takes them both forward!
I want to write here about a friend I briefly met in late September of 2000, corresponded with her only a few times after that but whose life continuous to inspire me the more I learn about her – as it has many others around the world. Her name is Jaroslava Moserova. She passed away on March 25, in her home in Prague, at the age of 76. We met in the historic city of Sarajevo as participants and resource persons at the World Media Assembly, initiated by the International Communications Forum with the International Federation of Journalists, The World Association of Newspapers, The Association of European Journalists, The Society of Professional Journalists, USA, The Committee of Concerned Journalists, USA, The European Journalism Centre, The Polish Association of Journalists and the Independent Union of Professional Journalists of Bosnia and Herzegovina. From this Assembly emerged “the Sarajevo Commitment”. (Those interested to read and sign the document as well may look up the ICF web site: http://icforum.org).
Sarajevo, the historic capital city of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly part of Yugoslavia, site of the 1984 Winter Olympics, ravaged by horrific incidents of violence and human bestiality, was also famous as having provided the spark that started the World War 1, with the assassination of Prince Ferdinand of Russia in this very city. But the country also represents not only a crucial meeting point of civilizations, but as well it was a place of courage and triumph of the human spirit where stoic stands made by heroic men and women, especially those in the field of the media. But, sadly, such stories are less known.
I arrived in Sarajevo a day earlier and was put up at the Holiday Inn, the hotel where the Assembly was being held, still pock-marked with shell-holes and in place of glass, some windows were covered with black plastic sheets. I recall attending a planning session by the organizers, in the afternoon of my arrival, where the ICF president was kind to invite me. But I left after a short while. As I was going up to my room, I was joined in the lift by a little old lady in greying hair and wearing a simple dress. I remember exchanging a few pleasantries with her. In the evening, over a formal dinner in a city restaurant, I was to find her sitting at the top of the table next to the ICF president. I learnt my “little old lady” was actually Senator Jaroslava Moserova of Czechoslovakia, then president and chair of the general conference of the UNESCO!
In the following days, we both spoke at the sessions. I asked for a lunch date and, along with a friend, we met formally. As we introduced ourselves and I addressed her as Senator Moserova, she said, `Please call me “Jara”. We talked about various things. But one could sense that she was rather more well-informed about the North East and the Nagas than she was letting on. And there was always that self-effacing smile on her face, her hair often falling across her big glasses. Along with her soft spoken-ness, she at times made you feel you were sitting with a shy teenage girl although there was nothing “teenage” about what she thought and said.
In 2002, some of us invited her to come to Nagaland. She wrote back a very nice letter, expressing her inability to come at the time but hoping to do so at some future date. She evinced interest in the health of the thinking of our people. Information filtered back to us later that her party was then wanting her to stand for the presidential elections in her country – she did stand for the elections and won in the first round but withdrew in the third ballot because she did not want to cause a rift between the Senate where she had majority and the lower house where Vaclav Klaus had majority support.
Senator Moserova was a doctor by profession, burns and plastic surgery specialist and a pioneer in xenografting, using pig skin to treat burns. She was also in turn a talented musician, painter, sculptor, playwright and a champion skier. And she was famous throughout her country for her translation of the Dick Francis detective novels – a fact she discovered more and more during election meetings after she joined politics! In 1949, she was in the USA, having won the American Field Service scholarship but decided to return home after Soviet Russia seized power in Czechoslovakia. She had no illusions about what faced her country. In the following years, although she would only describe herself as “a passive resister”, even long after, she was in the thick of events, including during the Prague Spring of 1969 when the Czech uprising was ruthlessly suppressed. And, for 30 years, as a medical practitioner, she went around treating her countrymen, even crawling “through collapsed tunnels” to reach the injured and treat them.
Following the “Velvet Revolution” when her country freed itself from the Red Army’s control, in 1990, she became a member of the National Council, and then the new Parliament. Soon, Vaclav Havel, a childhood friend, appointed her Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand. One of her first acts in Canberra was to tear down the high steel fence surrounding the embassy. (One wonders whether this was a norm for Soviet bloc countries then. In 1982, staying as guest of an Australian family in Canberra, next to an East European country – Yugoslavia, I think – I also saw such a fence). During her last year in Canberra, she wrote and staged a play titled “Letter to Wollongong” about the situation in Czechoslovakia, hoping to heal internal divisions. It was first performed in Sydney for the Czech community, with Moserova herself playing the lead role. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, “the play was so hard-hitting … that Moserova was slow to have it performed in her own country”. Later, however, in 1997, Prague’s Black Box Theatre Company staged it and eventually, in 2001, the Anglo-Nordic Productions Trust filmed it in Prague itself.
On return to Prague, in late 1993, she was elected to the Czech Senate where she was vice president for two years. In 1996, she became president of the UNESCO and of its general conference and chair, the more senior position, in 1999 and occupied this position till 2001. She believed the UNESCO “played a crucial role at a very difficult time”, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington – under her chairmanship, the 31st general conference of the UNESCO was “the only government-level conference not to be postponed (and it) unanimously condemned terrorism”. Following Havel’s retirement, as mentioned above, she became a candidate for the presidency, standing against two former prime ministers.
Paying tribute to Senator Moserova, in an unusually long piece titled “First-class amateur fought for the truth”, the Sydney Morning Herald, on April 15, wrote, “It is hard to go past applying the phrase “renaissance woman” to Dr Jara Moserova… She preferred to be called a “universal amateur”, but when her convictions were aroused “fiery particle” might have been more apt. She certainly became a strong moral force in her country”. The Herald also said, she was “noted for her integrity” and quoted from her own writing, “My credo was always to do what you have to do to the best of your ability, and not to tell lies, especially to yourself … I was no hero in the dark days of our history, but I never betrayed my beliefs”.
Senator Moserova was a vice president of the International Communications Forum, an advisory panel on media values and ethics, and at one time she even considered giving up her political life to work full-time for the Forum. Mourning her loss, the founder-president of the ICF, Mr William E Porter, said that “she took particular interest … in effecting the purpose and behaviour of humanity (and) to point up answers for the problems, social and personal that effect the life of society. They always dealt with real situations and challenged the individual to change and action”.
Senator Moserova’s husband, Milan David, was himself a dissenting lawyer. For years, under Russian Communism, he was not allowed to practise and was even imprisoned. It was ironical that the prison cell number (“47”) and the street number of the Czechoslovakian embassy in Canberra were the same. But this “was to cast no shadow over what was an extraordinarily happy posting to Canberra”, according to a family friend. She is survived by her husband, stepson and his family.
